As a Scrum Master my opinion on doing Scrum in combination with a fixed price, fixed functionality and fixed deadline is somewhat tricky to grasp. However, it still common that in many projects fixed price is just simply the norm. For instance, this is often the case in public tenders for government or education institutions […]

Westminster Abbey – View from the Queen Elizabeth II conference center …and now back home On my desk lies a stack of notepads from the QCon sponsors. I pick up one of them and turn few pages trying to decipher my own handwriting. As I read my notes I reflect back on the conference. QCon […]

There is an interesting approach from the German IT service provider Adesso AG and the Ruhr Institute for Software Technology on how to balance project risks between service providers and their customers within a new contracting model, which is a combination of fixed price and Time & Material approaches. I want to give a brief […]

Just to get us started, have you ever had a look on the original paper describing the waterfall model? You really should, have look at it. What you see is surprising; the author shows the famous waterfall diagram on page 2 and directly below he writes “… the implementation described above is risky and invites […]

Technical Debt (TD) is the gap between perfectly developing software and the reality (ship date, skills of the engineers, tools available, working environment). You get it, when you take shortcuts that fall short on good practices. As in finance, not all debt is bad. Take a debt to buy a house is mostly a good […]

JTeam is proud to announce the release of Paazl, one of the projects that we have been working on recently. Paazl offers a solution to the growing demand for choice when it comes to shipping. The platform JTeam developed allows Paazl customers (mostly webshop owners) to offer a range of options in shipment to their […]

Okay, so we kind of concluded fixed-price contracts are evil but what are the alternatives? Before we move on, let’s get the terminology right. Erik van Oosten rightfully commented we might have to start using the terms fixed-feature and fixed-term on top of fixed-price. To take it to a bit more general level, in a […]

At JTeam we’ve been doing projects for ages and generally speaking we’ve always done things the agile way. Convincing the customer of the importance of agility and flexibility is something we’ve never found to be a hard sell. How to write this up in a proposal and how to draw up a contract around such […]